Asif Mahmood
The images from Gaza today are not merely tragic; they are the darkest chapter in modern human history. To herd a besieged population with the promise of food and water, only to bomb them, is an act of cruelty that surpasses words. And yet, the silence of the so-called civilized West exposes a bitter truth: the most ruthless and merciless civilization on earth is the very one that claims to be the most advanced.
Two questions stare the world in the face. First, in this age of universal human rights, why do Western powers continue to shield Israel despite its crimes against Palestinians? Second, why is Israel itself so relentless, so unapologetically brutal?
The first answer lies in the uncomfortable origins of human rights discourse. What we celebrate today as “universal human rights” were, in fact, originally framed as Christian human rights. This is not a slander but a matter of historical record. Later, under the ideology of the “White Man’s Burden,” the explicitly Christian framing was dropped, and the concept was repackaged as universal. But the underlying practice never changed.
In the corridors of Western power, these rights still apply primarily to themselves. The Muslim, to them, remains a second-class human being, unworthy of the same concern. Ordinary citizens in the West may march and protest for Palestine, but policymakers are well aware: human rights, in their original conception, were never meant to be Muslim rights.
As for Israel’s savagery, one cannot dismiss it as a mere byproduct of war or state policy. Professor Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and former faculty member at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, documented in his seminal work “Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years” disturbing details that explain much of today’s violence. On one page he recalls how Jewish children were instructed to offer prayers when passing a Jewish cemetery, but if the graveyard belonged to Muslims or Christians, they were told to curse the dead instead.
On another, he cites Israeli military directives instructing soldiers that even when facing unarmed civilians, “under the principle of halakhah they must be killed, for no Arab can ever be trusted , not even one who appears to be civilian.”
Shahak went further in “Racism and the State of Israel”, exposing how entire villages were erased , homes bulldozed, wells poisoned, graveyards demolished , simply to sustain the myth that Palestine had been an empty wasteland before Israel’s founding.
Another Israeli voice, the historian Benny Morris, though himself a Zionist, revealed bitter facts in “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited”. He documented how within the first year of Israel’s creation, 400 Palestinian villages were depopulated, their residents massacred, expelled, or terrorized into flight. Bulldozers flattened homes, and the work was carried out not only by Israeli soldiers but also by paramilitary groups like the Haganah, often with British assistance. Their official “Plan D” explicitly called for Arab villages to be burned to the ground, leaving nothing behind.
That Morris himself is a Zionist is telling. He admits openly that his purpose was not political advocacy but simply historical documentation. Yet even his narrative cannot hide the horror: ethnic cleansing was not an accident of war, it was a strategy of statecraft.
The conclusion is unavoidable. Violence, dispossession, and contempt for Palestinian life are not anomalies in Israel’s history ; they are its founding principles. To the occupier, a dog or a cat has rights; a Palestinian child does not.